I am an Assistant Professor in the Neurosciences dept. of Lerner Research Institute, and my lab is focused on developing and optimizing new methods to study the effect of neurological conditions and age-related neurodegeneration diseases on the brain function. Our methods include two- and three-photon microscopy, as well as third-harmonic generation microscopy and calcium imaging. These methods are complementary to each other and comprehensively assess the contribution of different pathologies to the progression of a specific disease/condition rodent model. I strongly believe that such a holistic approach for longitudinal evaluation of disease progression is a missing key component for better understanding of the pathology and for testing novel therapeutic approaches.
I have extensive and broad training in biomedical optics and its application to neuroscience, as well as in engineering sensors for detecting neuronal activity. During my doctoral research with Prof. Shy Shoham at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, I studied advanced optical methods, like temporal focusing and remote scanning, and implemented them for rapid functional microscopy of neuronal populations [1]. As a postdoctoral researcher working with Drs. Karel Svoboda and Douglas Kim in the HHMI Janelia GENIE Project, we developed novel protein sensors for detecting neuronal activity, such as jGCaMP7, jRGECO1a, jRCaMP1, and CaMPARI [2-4]. We demonstrated how new sensors enable studying new questions, like deep imaging with red sensors to monitor layer VI cells, dual-color labeling of calcium sensors to study interactions between two intermingled populations, and selective labeling based on cellular-tuning properties with CaMPARI.